Tag Archives: prison

What: Bristol ABC is hosting ex-prisoner, Kyle Major, to speak at an event in September with the Incarcerated Workers Organising Committee. It is about his experiences in a Close Supervision Centre; one of Britain’s highest security prisons.

Trigger warning: This talk will share experiences of abuse, assault, trauma and medical neglect in the prison system.

Prisoners at a West Midlands prison have assaulted staff and started “multiple” fires in a week-long outbreak of disorder. A major incident was declared at Featherstone Prison on Thursday as riot police were drafted in to deal with the trouble, which also included a hostage situation. An extra 20 screws have now been called in to maintain order at the category C prison near Wolverhampton.

An inmate at the jail, which holds more than 600 prisoners and said the disorder started following a fight in one of the prisoner accommodation blocks. The fight could not be brought under control and screws had to call in reinforcements. He claimed three people were taken to hospital on Tuesday after further trouble, and screws were assaulted on Wednesday when they attempted to move some inmates to another block. Prisoners set fire to cells on Thursday and Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service sent two crews to the jail.

The event was part of a series of prison-related actions, which included solidarity noise demos at 3 different prisons, and a blockade of the prison construction site itself.

Notes

[1] It is estimated that the proposed new prison will cost £250m. It will hold more than 2100 prisoners and be the largest prison in the UK and the second largest in Europe.

[2] Reclaim the Fields is a constellation of people and collective projects willing to go back to the land and reassume the control over food production. The organisation held an action camp at Borras Community Protection Camp entitled ‘Build Gardens Not Prisons’ in solidarity with local anti-fracking campaigns, with workshops on a range of topics linking access to land, prison abolition and opposition to fracking.

Like this:

Right-wing Tory Justice Minister Chris Grayling’s declaration in late April that prisoners would now be made to “earn” basic privileges by “working harder” probably wasn’t just the usual “popularist” promise to stick the boot into one of the most powerless and demoralised social groups. During times of economic austerity and potential social unrest scapegoating marginalised and outcast groups like prisoners, is always useful as a means of deflecting and re-focusing public anger away from the true culprits of the country’s economic ruination, in this case Grayling’s pals in the city of London. Behind the rhetoric and the guise of “getting tough” on prisoners is the actual purpose of the prison
industrial complex: to turn prisons into privatised forced-labour factories.